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Sunday, 14 November 2010

#MFLSAT Oldham

Yesterday I spent a most enjoyable day at The Radclyffe School in Oldham at the third MFL Show and Tell (affectionately and tweetingly known as #MFLSAT). It was brilliantly organised by Isabelle Jones and brought together about forty MFL teachers from all over the UK (and Germany!).

I gave a short presentation about mini-books, something which I love and which I have used successfully (in my opinion) with my primary classes. Here is my presentation:

A lot of people have asked where I got the jigsaw thing in the PowerPoint. I actually found it quite by chance while I was looking for a suitable template for the presentation. The instructions are here, and you can access the actual template via the same link. As far as mini-books are concerned, the most important link is the "how to make a mini-book" one.

As is usual with #MFLSAT, I left totally enthused, my head buzzing with lots of ideas. In no particular order, here are some of the things I'd like to try:

Selecting pupils at random to answer a questionMarie O'Sullivan showed us The Hat, which you can use to select one pupil at a time. As far as I can see, once you've selected one particular pupil, they are then safe from selection for the rest of the lesson, unless you start the Hat up again.Dominic McGladdery gave us lots of examples of ways to select pupils at random, starting with lolly sticks with pupils' names on which are drawn from the "Mug of Misery" (as it has been christened by Dom's pupils!) I really like this PowerPoint random name selector from Fresherschools.com as well.
I'm particularly interested in this as it is one of the things mentioned at my PM review, and one of the teachers at my school is very keen to get all the pupils alert and not coasting.

Intercultural UnderstandingSomething I am very interested in (see previous posts) and so I'm always grateful for new links and ideas to help me in my endeavours.
Marie-France Perkins showed us the website of Collège les Tamarins on the island of Réunion. A particularly useful part of the website is the "Visite du Collège", which shows photos and plans of the school. Suzi Bewell showed us "Ecoles du Monde", a book written in simple French and with beautiful photographs of schoolchildren around the world. Suzi also guided us to Links into Languages's 10 minute guide to Intercultural Understanding.

Groovy Tech ToolsKath Holton showed us some of the tools she uses in the classroom and to facilitate home learning. Spicynodes looks worthy of closer investigation, as does Zondle.
Vanessa Parker from The Radclyffe School showed us some PowerPoint ideas. I liked her idea for a twist on Kim's Game. Instead of just making a picture disappear and asking the children which one it is, Vanessa suggests asking them which one they think will disappear and giving them a point if they are right. I also liked her idea to have a bag or basket of images flash across the screen and pupils have to name all the objects. Flypast taken one step further.